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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Chipping Away

Sorry about the lack of a post yesterday; wasn't feeling too great, though I still managed to grind out 2,000 words or so. Made up for it today, getting to almost 34,000 words total (116 pages or so). Feeling good about the project, though I know it needs a ton of work once I'm done.

I still don't really want to put the concept for my book out there (yet...as my Dad would say, "Have a paish...", but the structure goes a lot like this:

Intro

Story 1

Intermission

Story 2

Intermission

Story 3

Conclusion

Today I finished up story one, and I think it went pretty well overall. The types of things that I worry about are whether or not the stories are original enough and certain rough patches of language slowing things down; you know, the small stuff!

It is weird to be done with this first story because I find myself at the end of my first "plot outline." I don't really have anything plotted out for stories two and three, so you can imagine what tomorrow morning is going to be dedicated to.

What I wanted to write about a bit today is that it's just amazing to me that I've been able to put together 34,000 words in semi-coherent fashion (I hope). There are times when I thought, "there's no way I'll even finish this section, let alone the whole book," but each writing session brought me a little bit closer to my goal, and now I find myself with one complete story in the bank.

Not to say that it still doesn't require a lot of polishing; I'm sure I'll cut some of it and re-work a good amount of it. Not to mention that it raises a lot of issues; is it too long? Are people going to stay engaged in the story while reading it? Does it make sense?

All of these will go into the next parts of the book, and hopefully make them even better than the one I just completed.

Of course, the ultimate goal is to make the entire thing of very high quality when it's all said and done. Though I'm a ways away from that, at least I have the first basic story down on paper right now, and I'll be able to work on it going forward.

I guess my larger point is that we sometimes set huge, even seemingly insurmountable goals for ourselves over the course of our lives...or at least the enterprising ones of us do, I suppose...but I digress...be it writing a book, or climbing a mountain, or swimming the English Channel, or losing a certain amount of weight.

No matter what your goal is, there are going to be times after you start where you question if you'll ever make it there, if you'll ever finish.

It's nice for me, for a day at least, to see my days of chipping away at that goal, little by little, finally adding up into something tangible that I can be proud of.